Utopia, you are standing in it!

Last week The New Zealand Initiative released The Health of the State, our report on public health and lifestyle regulations. You may have caught some of the media coverage on it.

While the report has a bunch of key messages that I think are important, here’s the one I found most valuable during the course of this research: don’t rely on media coverage or press releases alone. Read the report. And even then, read the whole report, not just the abstract and conclusion. It’s amazing, and incredibly rewarding, discovering studies – evenly highly regarded studies – aren’t all that they seem.

Outcomes from the panel discussion

To launch the report, we held a panel discussion where I spoke alongside The Treasury’s Chief Economist and Deputy Secretary Dr Girol Karacaoglu, Maori Party co-leader Marama Fox, and Institute for Economic Affairs Fellow Jamie Whyte. You can watch the full panel discussion here

I’ve written previously, and skeptically, about the financial capability strategy the government released last year. It is something of a wonder that civilisations have reached their current prosperity and sophistication without the aid of governments and their officials strategizing and pontificating about what we, citizens, “need” to know about money.  “Building the financial capability of New Zealanders is”, we are told, “a priority for the government”.  But what business is it of theirs?   And each time I read that line, I can’t help thinking that it would be better, and much more legitimate, if it were reversed: building financial capability of governments (and its agencies and officials) should be a priority for New Zealanders.

Last week, the bureaucrats were at it again.  The Financial Markets Authority published a so-called White Paper, with a Foreword written by the Chief Executive (so this is no mere background research paper, simply reporting the…

I have an op-ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled, “College Sex-Assault Trials Belong in Court, Not on Campus,” and there’s already a lively discussion in the comments. I would welcome your thoughts, on this site or that one.

I have previously criticized universities and news outlets for their handling of racism on and around campus (and sexual assault, too). But I’m not in the business of giving activists advice. So I’mspeaking out of turn on one side point here, to recommend: don’t talk to the police. (Nothing personal.)

The campus police at UW have released body camera video ofthem escorting a student from class and arresting him for allegedly spray-painting anti-racist graffiti. (For critical commentary on this situation, here’s astatement from faculty at staff, including a bunch of sociologists; and a letter of support forstudents from the faculty and staff in Afro-American studies.) Several things are disturbing about this; I’d like to call attention to the conversation. Here’s the video, with my comment below:

(Other videos from the police department, showing other parts of their interactions, are here.)

I have no idea whether this man…

The Pew Research Center recently put out a report on the share of U.S. older women living alone. The main finding they reported was a reversal in the long trend toward old women living alone after 1990. After rising to a peak of 38% in 1990, the share of women age 65+ living along fell to 32% by 2014. It’s a big turnaround. The report attributes it in part to the rising life expectancy of men, so fewer old women are widowed.

The tricky thing about this is the changing age distribution of the old population (the Pew report breaks the group down into 65-84 versus 85+, but doesn’t dwell on the changing relative size of those two groups). Here’s an additional breakdown, from the same Census data Pew used (from IPUMS.org), showing percent living alone by age for women:

Two things in this figure: the percent living alone is much lower…

The World Bank’s latest PR campaign is that “for the first time in history” we can “eliminate extreme poverty” (for the hubris of this claim and the many times it’s been said before see here).

Lost in the fine print is the disclaimer that “extreme poverty” is defined as $1.25 / day.

And there has been some progress on that front (clic the pic for a better image):

However, since virtually all the decline from 1981 to 2009 is from China, I’d give the credit largely to “state capitalism” and not to any top down multilateral agency development program.

And, if we raise the bar on extreme poverty to, say, $2.00 per day, the situation is far from rosy (clic the pic for a better image):

At $2.00 China’s progress is not as great, India is regressing, as is SSA and overall, the number barely budges in the last…